It Trends 2008 (Tin180 Com)

Editor's Notes

• #6: Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years.  Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt. WOA = Web Oriented Architecture (cloud computing) "Companies should factor these technologies into their strategic planning process by asking key questions and making deliberate decisions about them during the next two years," said David Cearley, vice president of IT for Gartner Symposium , an event being held next month where the analyst plans to go into more detail about its predictions. "Sometimes the decision will be to do nothing with a particular technology. In other cases it will be to continue investing in the technology at the current rate. In still other cases, the decision may be to test/pilot or more aggressively adopt/deploy the technology. The important thing is to ask the question and proactively plan."
• #7: Potential "green" regulations could further constrain companies from expanding data centres and the impact of power grids and carbon emissions are under constant scrutiny, meaning that the pressure to get and stay green is only set to increase. Gartner has previously claimed that the manufacturing, transportation and use of IT equipment causes roughly two per cent of the world's carbon emissions, on a par with the aviation industry.
• #8: Currently, 20 per cent of the installed base with private branch exchanges (PBX) have migrated to IP telephony, with more than 80 per cent in a trial phase, according to Gartner, which expects the majority of companies to embark on full-blown implementation over the next three years. The impending switch to unified communications, the first major change in voice communications since the mobile phone revolution, could prove key as companies look towards reducing meeting-related travel as part of their mission to become greener.
• #12: Mashup originally referred to the practice in pop music (notably hip-hop) of producing a new song by mixing two or more existing pieces. In technology, a mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool; an example is the use of cartographic data from Google Maps to add location information to real-estate data from Craigslist, thereby creating a new and distinct web service that was not originally provided by either source. There are already several mashup platforms that help user create mashups. Examples include: Yahoo pipes Microsoft Popfly
• #13: Example is Amazon’s “Simple DB”, a database management system that exists in the “cloud”.
• #15: Example: Electronics commercial where the customer texts his bank to find out what his credit balance is at the moment.
• #16: Web 2.0 – According to Tim O'Reilly, " Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. " An IBM social networking analyst, Dario de Judicibus, has proposed a different definition which is more focused on social interactions and architectural implementation: " Web 2.0 is a knowledge-oriented environment where human interactions generate content that is published, managed and used through network applications in a service-oriented architecture. " Most services are primarily web based and provide a collection of various ways for users to interact, such as chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, discussion groups, and so on. The main types of social networking services are those which contain directories of some categories (such as former classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages), and recommender systems linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with MySpace,[1] Bebo[2] and Facebook[1] being the most widely used in the anglosphere, Google's Orkut in the South American country of Brazil,[3] and Friendster being the most widely used in Asia.[4][5][6]
• #17: It’s all hitting the network first. Cisco says it is responding to two significant technology trends sweeping college and university communities as educators and administrators strive to meet the needs of students accustomed to a media-rich, mobile lifestyle, while at the same time working to strengthen campus security via interoperable communications.
• #18: The diversification of the software supply chain will require new management skills. Today, it’s the rare application that’s developed and coded from the ground up by collocated internal resources. Development efforts are commonly distributed across geographies, organizations, and cultures.2 But in 2008, the diversification of the software supply chain will move beyond sourcing to include the assembly of new solutions out of existing components, courtesy of approaches like service-oriented architecture and business process management. To successfully harness the resources of disparate software and services providers, application development organizations will have to make process and tooling changes. Rapidly changing business conditions will require that software be built for change. As the pace of business change increases, so will the pace of change in business requirements. In the past, application development professionals have designed applications solely to meet today’s requirements. Now, they’ll have to design applications to meet indeterminate future requirements as well. This will require knowledge of which requirements are most likely to change and how the application can be designed to enable change.4 Going one step further, many application development organizations are beginning to adopt architectures that put the power to effect change in the hands of the businesspeople. Development and delivery cycles will shorten even more. Application development organizations must use modern delivery processes and practices to remain competitive and to help the larger enterprise do the same. One of the most disruptive trends in application development is the adoption of Agile development processes, which requires dramatic and far-reaching change.7 In 2008, even shops that aren’t moving immediately to Agile processes will start to take baby steps in that direction, moving from waterfall to iterative and from threemonth to one-month iterations. This shift in development methods is in large part a response to demand from the business to deliver software more rapidly and more often. In 2008, this will drive changes in release management practices as well. Disruptive new technologies will extend developers’ reach. Two trends will conspire to disrupt programming practices in 2008. The first is the challenge of handling ever larger volumes of transactions and data. The second is the arrival of new technologies and architectures that make this possible. Multicore, grid computing, distributed caching, and complex event processing all have great promise, but the challenge isn’t just to select the right technology. To take advantage of these breakthroughs, application development professionals will also have to learn new ways of building software. The role of business analyst will change and grow in importance. Most enterprises understand how important business analysts (BAs) are to maximizing the business value of projects and portfolios, but few have acted on this understanding and established strong career paths for BAs. This won’t be possible in 2008, as nearly every trend affecting application development increases the importance of business analysts.
• #19: Virtualization everywhere. You’ve been hearing about, and probably using, virtualization in your data center for years, but adoption of the technology is growing fast. Our data shows that, on average, firms have virtualized almost one-quarter of their x86 servers and expect to have nearly half virtualized by 2009, but three-quarters have been using the technology for two years or less.2 Virtualization will continue its expansion into storage, network, and even client environments in 2008.3 Client side virtualization, in particular, is attracting a lot of interest from Forrester clients looking for an alternative to the traditional high maintenance PC environment. The consolidation of everything. Like most enterprise IT organizations, you probably struggle to accommodate growing business demands within a fixed IT envelope, an envelope that likely gets smaller every year.5 An August 2007 survey of IT decision-makers revealed that enterprises are looking at servers, data center facilities, storage, networks, and staff as targets for consolidation, and Forrester expects infrastructure consolidation to be a key theme for 2008.6 Standardization and simplification of IT. IT process automation shows growing promise for the reduction of operational costs through automation of low end processes, a logical continuation of the introduction of business service management (BSM), and the configuration management database (CMDB). Low-level processes in IT operations consume the best part of server, network, and database administrators. Most of these tasks are repetitive, follow a well defined and documented workflow, and require a fair amount of manual intervention to feed the right information to the right tool. Automating these low level processes can significantly reduce labor costs and enable administrators to focus on more strategic activities. Business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) are at the heart of major IT initiatives. According to Forrester’s “Enterprise And SMB Hardware Survey, North America And Europe, Q3 2007,” 83% of surveyed enterprises that are interested in or have already implemented server virtualization said that improving disaster recovery was an important or very important driver in the adoption of server virtualization.7 BC/DR plays a major role in consolidation activities as well.8 In 2008, Forrester expects business continuity and disaster recovery to drive many infrastructure investments in servers, storage, and management tools. Also, firms will formalize business continuity management (BCM) programs by staffing up, ensuring that the BCM leaders report directly to the executive team, and standardizing BCM requirements across business units and global operations. A new wave of technology refresh will kick in. 2008 could well turn out to be one of general infrastructure technology refresh within and beyond the data center. Data center consolidation efforts, whether they involve collapsing duplicated infrastructure software onto fewer, larger machines or bringing in more powerful, multi-core servers to carry a bigger workload, will drive investments in new server infrastructure. On the network front, firms will look to upgrade the aging local area network (LAN) gear with 10 gigabit Ethernet and iSCSI technology to handle the ever increasing workload. Also in 2008, one-quarter of enterprises will start deploying Windows Vista.9 This investment that will generally call for new, more powerful PC hardware and, with an increasing push towards mobility, should make laptops the first choice for much of that hardware.10
• #20: · Strengthen joint IT-business planning through use of model-based planning. Creating linked business and IT plans is a struggle unless there is a common language and framework for planning. Model-based planning tools like business capability maps promote common business and IT understanding that focuses IT investments for the greatest strategic payback.4 Budgets, performance metrics, and governance are tied together by use of these models. · Restructure organizations to foster alignment. Reversing the trend of centralizing IT to gain economies of scale, change agent CIOs will structure their organizations to get as close to the business as possible by dispersing staff into business areas to gain business knowledge and act as technology advisors. This will be more than co-location; change agent CIOs will use this as a means to share work prioritization with their business counterparts.5 · Foster strategic planning and architecture as key competencies. For many CIOs, developing IT strategic plans is a “sometime” thing with dubious impact. Change agent CIOs, realizing that shaping business perception requires an up-to-date strategy, will ensure that strategic plan development, update, and review is an on-going and tuned process. The IT target state architecture vision is the most essential part of shaping business perceptions; strategic plans will eschew lists of projects in favor of roadmaps to the target state. · Strengthen their roles on the executive team — and with the board of directors. CIOs generally have excellent enterprisewide perspective, with visibility across line-of-business and functional silos. Change agent CIOs parlay this perspective, which complements the perspectives of the CEO and CFO, to identify business model-based opportunities for customer intimacy, operational excellence, and innovation. A role advising the board of directors is a logical outcome, a few CIOs having been asked to join their companies’ boards as inside directors. · Structure their organizations to drive standardization. Standardization of technology and applications is the key to driving down IT costs, standardization of processes the key to driving up quality and consistency. As cost and quality are key metrics for these CIOs, they will continue to centralize their organizations and organize skills and processes around centers of excellence in order to drive standardization and achieve higher quality and lower cost. · Improve transparency, measurement, and monitoring to uncover efficiencies. General manager CIOs will increasingly manage their organizations “by the numbers.” In 2008, more of these CIOs will create performance feedback loops from application, project, and infrastructure efforts, thereby increasing the effectiveness of operational planning and execution. Application scoring mechanisms that gauge the fitness of business applications will become more common as they enable CIOs to justify application modernization, replacement, and retirement choices, streamline the portfolio, and decrease excessive lights-on IT costs.6 · Assume management of other corporate “shared” services. In 2008, a growing number of general manager CIOs will assume management of non-IT functions.7 Recognized for their expertise at running shared service IT organizations, general manager CIOs will adopt other shared-service organizations that might include anything from facilities management to customer service. The new responsibilities will expand CIO career options, with the limitation that these are functions in which the goals are quality service at a managed cost.